Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
6.02
Holy Fucking Terror
by Travis Hedge Coke
“Allegory and analogy can help understanding, but are misleading if pushed too far.”
– A Map of the Invisible: Journeys into Particle Physics, Jon Butterworth
Every rescue is a robbery in progress.
So, what is Tom? Every Tom, Dick, and Harry?
The Hairy Bird is a film about preparatory school students in the early 1960s conspiring to stop their school from becoming coed after a student is assaulted by boys from the merging Saint Ambrose Boys Academy. Their school, Miss Godard’s Preparatory School for Girls, produces scientists, politicians, writers, actors, leaders and civil servants.
Maybe, Sarah Kernochan’s movie, whose title was offensive enough it was changed in the United States and the United Kingdom, is not an answer, but what about Tom?
Why so much aggression?
Linda Gray Sexton has been demonized and criticized for being candid about her more-famous mother’s abuse of her, and for not condemning her to the satisfaction of people many degrees removed from a specific familial, lifelong relationship.
That part in The Dark Knight Returns in which Ellen Yindel recognizes that Batman may be too big to judge. That big part of your childhood history course, when the teacher said the same of someone who orchestrated a genocide.
May be.
May be we are each of us a “hunter killer macrobe,” like the faceless Orlando who wears any face if he kills it first.
Did Mr Quimper truly once look like a storied gray alien? Crucified like a party favor Jesus? Maybe.
Maybe does a lot of lifting for this and other universes.
All the faces of a harlequinade under and over.
What pressures on Freddie on Tom? Now does he feel his title hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief? What unmasked pressure beside Tom on the train ground. (I think a reason we never have a full adaptation of The King in Yellow, is that we grow discomfited when we do not know anymore the genre we are in. Like unto the cowboy villain who thinks he is the hero and is not either. Experiencing the seven treasures of conscience, corner, barley, grape and figs.)
Frater Nemo (a name of Tom; check the shadow in 6.03) along with Frater Ariel (check email address; see 3.02) in recluse virgin satyric Merlin. The columbine hawk. Sickle dove and galant smith’s hammer.
How often are Nimue or Morgan the enemy of Arthurian good when the teller has a sociopolitical reason for them to be? Why are they the forthright, the good, when it aids an agenda?
Julian of Norwich put forward the idea that sin has a human existence, but only an existence for living humanity. There is no sin in God or the divine. Applied to the apparent cosmogonic framework King Mob or Tom O’Bedlam seem to operate from – and Jack Frost’s visions of Christ and irremovable nails is very Julianesque – the creature complications of living people are only sinful or hurtful in the abstraction of our kind of world.
John A Keel says, “Group acceptance of undemonstrated existence theorems and of seductive beliefs adds no more vitality to the theorems and to the beliefs.” He is quoting Dr John C Lilly.
fig = camelot.plot(tables[0], kind =’grid’
fig and walnut starter with king arthur unbleached
pluck a fig
cot out, little suck-a-bed
Beatles to butterflies, first to last issues and all the universes between, The Invisibles is a long unending quote from ElFayed, whether being quoted by Jack Frost or quoted by the representational telling that is The Invisibles. Thirteen mirrors can be keys, but keys can be crossed and anyone can go kitty-corner to a crossroads and jaywalk or step off as the sky crows.
wasps
As the crow flies, AIDS and AIDS culture, AIDS acculturation holds court over every page of the comic, The Invisibles, and the world which the comic, The Invisibles, doubles over to represent. That the acorn does not fall from the tree is a helpful lie. It lays there.
Orlando chooses a name from street theatre, like the Harlequinade, the Punch & Judy transliteration of a colonizing soldier.
The Hermit, as a traditional European symbol, is the master of the invisible, the charmer of serpents, taciturn and tedious and committed to study and patient accomplishment of big magic. Tom is profoundly the European tradition, an old money, old order descendent, the Tom Bombadil of The Invisibles, the Atom Bombadil, enigmatic, overwhelming, awkwardly fit, divinely mandatory, make manifest, married to the River Dodder off Anna Liffey.
In our kind of world, Atum a Bedlam is guilty of sins. In our kind of world, Mob is a murderer. Sir Miles is a mass murderer, a war criminal, a facilitator of rapists and a brute villain. In our kind of world, having these acts presented as fictional narratives, or having true life peoples presented in a fictive context, they are illustrative, they can educate, evoke, or elucidate, but the acts lack sinfulness. Sinfulness can be transferred, or is at least, spuriously correlated, existing in an author or artist, an editor or publisher, or in audiences as they receive and make criminal act with something in the narratives.
But, what worries a certain audience is not how many people King Mob or Tom O’Bedlam have killed or taken to their death. What worries them is whether Tom is gay or Mob is into something kinky. What are they doing with those leathers and boys our aging Peter Pans? It is the Robert Mapplethorpeness setting them off, as it often is what makes one the wickedest man.
There were legal investigations into the first issue of The Invisibles, in our world, and whether or not it was instructive to criminals or incited criminal action.
Some people are still angry that the writer asked willing audiences to participate in a group masturbation ritual around the world.
I know at least one person who takes a particular two pages’ artistic license as a personal affront.
I wonder how much AIDS took away some folks’ feeling they could be spared when the lots are put against the wall or sent to camps. People who thought they had bought in or secured themselves. White enough. Of a class enough. The right neighborhood or sexuality or public face. Once it was hard enough for them to admit, in privacy to themselves, that AIDS was not something someone like them could get, it became something which could take away what cancer or a car crash could not. A status they may never have even really reckoned with.
AIDS became about isolating people, shaming people, letting them die became passé; help them die. Box them away. Cut them out. Point at where they used to be. But, they/them became, for these folks, themselves. And, that got scary.
The myths that AIDS came from aggrieved Africans as revenge for colonialism, that AIDS was a contractual obligation missed in the fine print of invasive colonial wars, that AIDS was consequence for Western decadence, all speak with enticing, kindly autonomous sensory meridian response tones to the scared, assuaging their guilt with imprecatory implicated guilt.
Everyone else knew already, they will always eventually get around to you and putting you in a camp, putting you in a prison, putting you in a pine box, a ditch, a common grave; to exile you from where you were and be, to ghettoize you yet again, in body, domesticity and soul.
In these models, and in the use of models, sin dissolves. It lessens. Dispersal of sin and the rationalizing of it as an inherently abstract and permeable and mutable principality, we ought to be prepared to confront the immediate in-world causal results and the out-of-world non-causal stasis, and also human envy, justification, bullshit, fear, and anthropomorphism.
they enter us
they take from us
Tom O’Bedlam is often mad. Is he deranged? Mentally ill? He is mentally unwell. He is angry. The anger of a dwindling white man empire, anglo uber alles.
Tom is also a teddy bear, a children’s toy, for us and for our youthful proxy to hold in his saddest and scaredest times.
Sin solves.
Julian of Norwich wrote, “sin is necessary but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”
Is he mad or is he scared?
I say, “Everything will be alright,” and, “It’s alright,” and, “I’m good.”
If the declaration is failing in the long term, the long becomes the short term, and the longer term will stretch beyond as you need it. Good for cults, banks, and deadlines when speaking with your editor.
“Do not take another’s path as your own; but, neither should you judge it,” is a quote from Helen Schucman or the person she claimed to channel, who went by, Jesus. An appealing detachment which can be used to encourage forgiveness and patience as well as submission to abuse and injury.
Tom tries to teach Jack Frost, not unification or exorcism, but empathy and disobedience. Beat his system. Beat him system. Stimming system.
We put the movie slasher on t-shirts more than the final girl, but we put real life serial killers on more merchandise than their victims. What that means depends on how much you care about real people.
The Marquis De Sade of the past seeing in a flayed rodent the glorious jewels and rubies of a bloodied woman is misogynist, hallucinatory, born of guilt and violence, but it is also Julian of Norwich seeing in Jesus’ impaled side the glories of Heaven and a place to suckle. It is King Mob’s momentary racism while torturing then murdering an Asian man. Edith’s classism. Mr Quimper’s delight in visiting or eliciting heightened emotion.
The white horse in Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2 could be the white horse in Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks (don’t make me say David Lynch), and they could be trauma or they could be the white horse the angel Gabriel led Mohammed to, beyond and all at the climax and apex of space and time and seven sam?w?t.
Symbols have traditions of use, traditions of reinforcement, make and model and systematization, but symbols are beyond and baroque. Free breaking free brokering free baked in.
If one is right, one can have said anything. Being wrong is what necessitates a specific and alternate path which could have been elucidated before the wrongness.
If one is right, or right on, non-causal or causal, magic thinking or ratiocination, hermetic, syncretic, Communist, Republican, conducive, inductive, inducing, reducing logic, knowledge, knowing, seeing, believing all flow in the wash. It all clots out in the wash.
The ends will not justify the means, but the means will not explain the ends. An understanding can be incomplete and complete. An understanding can be helpful and not entirely helpful. Not all things must be universally applicable to be. And, not-all-things must be universally applicable to be. And, not all things must be universally-applicable to be.
So, what is every Tom O’Bedlam? Every Tom, Dick, and Harry? What if, as someone says in some comic (it’s King Mob in The Invisibles) there is only one time and only one all-together death? Doll together death. Daath all to gather.
Tom O’Bedlams are not cured of illness or madness (which is an illness) but have a ticket to leave the hospital, to wander, to cure and to beg and to bargain, barter, and travel and charter. Tom O’Bedlam’s just an actor playing an actor playing an actor playing another actor who is his fool or is he?
Water, pearls, iron, brass, silver, gold, light. We use anything to make the path rockier. Inanna only had seven gates, not whole heavens. I forget anything that happens in The Phantom Tollbooth.
We use wit, rhetoric, humor, charm, chime in with glamour and l’amour, allusion and recidivism to avoid this. I like Tom O’Bedlam, the character. I like him. I like what he does for Jack before Jack even knows he is Jack. Little Dane McGowan. I like Dane. I forgive Dane is violence and anger.
Who is Dora and is she a character in The Invisibles? Why would her fake death so bother real writers?
We have a (docetic) difficulty sustaining awareness of fictive people are simulation and also emotionally and socially real.
It hurts.
We check under the covers. Under the bed. We reappraise.
A fictional character can be fake and affect us. Synthetic and engineered and real.
I know there is no violence and anger, that there is no Tom who does something for Jack except the ideas of them, communicated in pictures and memories, in dialogue balloons and discussions amongst readers.
My anger, frustration at Tom’s lack of empathy, for anyone’s willingness to murder or bomb or kick or be mean, is connected to my inability to distinguish myself from fictional and illustrative Tom or Jack or Quimper. My inability to not make up explanations for Jill Thompson, Danny Vozzo, Grant Morrison or Shelly Bond. My inability to not suppose about other readers, other audiences. My inability to not conjure you. Your inability to stop conjuring me.
You know me better than I have laid bare here. You know about me what I do not know.
A little bit. You do. You know a little bit about me that I do not know.
My teacher, Ariel at gloriana, calls it the tantra.
Les Tricoteuses are bad people. There for the kill. The Knitters are good people, taking the only political activism permitted. They are people. Only there.
“The rules are different for me,” said Bob Dylan on whether or not he is a plagiarist.
The gut-myth, heart-myth that if we take an action so contrary to a universal truth so true it is true of universe and us, alone and all, above, below, betwixt and through, we will separate from the universe or achieve a magical transition.
Not that the rules are different. They are different for me.
A colonialist view of magic is appropriate to a colonialist magician like Tom O’Bedlam (pretends to be). Would Jolly Roger in her trailer park pirate latitudes? Papa Skat? Papa Ghede? Barbi? Marta? Kate?
When we speak of clear-minded or methodology, how often do we mean our own? Who could prove it or tell of someone?
There is the star of the show and there are session players. Any one or all the session players can be better, do better, know better, and better the star. The star the star. Star the star.
When the glass is crystal clear, we didn’t see a thing.
Beryl is a semi-translucent stone good for the heart. Eighth stone in the foundation of the wall. Papa Ghede and Mama Lujo. Mary Brigitte.
Arthurian and Shakespearean worlds are panoplies of tellings, terraformed and soil-tilled orreries of world-stages showing story and people as though revolving and resolving stained-glass scenes. They have been told and retold since before a Shakespeare or a Mallory. They have been shewn, shown, shorn, resold, resealed.
Tom O’Bedlam does not only have an anger upon him, he is and has been angry. If not, he is always not human, but a pasted on image, a collage component; mask. Maybe. Everyone in The Invisibles is line art and script, color and ink, story and told. The difference betwixt the cute-past grimoires, fanfiction and tell-alls inside The Invisibles and The Invisibles, is that we are prepared, as audience, to embrace to a truthfulness to affectation in The Invisibles, but not as much for texts and art inside The Invisibles.
Jack being hit again and more by Tom O’Bedlam in word and fist and the open-hand karate chop. Whack-a-soul. It soul a game.
Tom has a loneliness on him. Jack Frost is a loneliness standing behind Jack Frost.
Does a hand exist before it appears? Is the first panel the first panel? Is a glass window the pane or all the panes or the picture in all the panes?
Is glass a thing which melts or a thing which powders? What natural order??
We live in refracted fear knowing that bigotry extends to far, even the bigoted-upon will be bigoted on themselves at times. In time we all corrupt brutally ourselves if others do not do it for us faster first.
Prism turns, the bijou pendant, penitent, tented tool of pages and players, plays and plays. It is the communiques of gesture. Turning a ball in hand in mummer practice in recitative rote in puppet play hand.
Edith Manning intended to write a novel. They make eyeglasses out of beryl and kits come from toms.
Edith did the terrible thing that turned Tom to a horror, but how responsible is she, in their decades and decades of interplay, for his acts? Beryl brought Edith into Invisiblism as much as she had sex with her when Edie was eighteen and Beryl, twenty-five. Do we judge that was we judge Boy and Jack? We judge Jack and Boy?
The Invisibles is a fanfic, a memoir, a novel, comic, game. There exists the Edith Manning Memoirs. Revisions of Kay. Dane tripping in a subway tunnel on placebo and blue mold. The dreams of King Mob from which he wakes up.
We reappraise?
The Invisibles could be bigoted. The racism or transphobia might not be ironic or in-character. How much The Invisibles, how much all great art, is made of cowardice? Acceptable and okeh are dissimilar as they are alike. Bravery is acceptable. It is okeh to be afraid.
We reappraise.
The Invisibles is a panoply of reaffirmed orreries of dissolving glassine since and sincere tellings. Ceresin just being an earth wax derivative. Paraffin from Scotland, Wales, the Himalayas and the Utah region of the United States. The flanks of the Carpathians have earth wax. Ukraine. A black mass, sometimes brown or yellow, it shows green.
Reprise?
It shows green.
Who is Ghede?
*******
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
John C Lilly. Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer.
JB Phillips. My Universe Was Invaded.
JB Phillips. The Newborn Christian.
Shakuntala Devi. Figuring.
Shakuntala Devi. The World of Homosexuals.
